John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

These specific campaigns and networks may be new, but the general idea is not. The Left Book Club of the 1930s was a political-cultural network to exchange information and build mutual support for anti-capitalist activity, although by its nature it was confined to a literate minority. Since the 1960s anti-capitalists have been using and exploiting the PR and advertising techniques of commodified capitalism to undermine the system that produced them. The ultimate aim of “culture jamming”, in all its forms, is to subvert the hold of the consumerist mindset on those who uncritically absorb it.

The idea derives from the Situationist International led by Guy Debord, who saw consumer capitalism as “the society of the spectacle”, eternally geared to mindless buying and selling, which urgently needed a series of specially constructed “situations” to wake itself up. One way of doing that was to appropriate an existing media artifact, such as an iconic advert, and alter it to give it a subversive meaning. In the 1960s, Situationism was linked to the great upheavals of 1968 and so had inevitable political overtones. Today it achieves the same ends through more indirect campaigns and alternative lifestyle choices like Buy Nothing Day, Ethical Consumerism, Microgeneration, Autonomous Building and Anti-Oppressive Education initiatives.

These movements, laudable though they are, will have limited impact if they stay confined to bourgeois sub-cultures. They must replace, day in and day out, the news, the soap opera, the water-cooler TV drama, the communal multimedia event. They will not become a genuine threat to neoliberal cultural hegemony until they are what people read, enjoy, discuss and anticipate in their downtime, weekends and holidays. The leaders of the new Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos, who come from a generation radicalised by Hardt-Negri and autonomism, have realised this. As Podemos’s general secretary Pablo Iglesias wrote, it is necessary to “generate discursively a popular identity that can be politicised along electoral lines”. 19

Flowing from the “Latin-americanisation” of Southern Europe after 2008, Iglesias and his collegues turned their popular television programmes La Tuerka ( The Screw ) and Fort Apache into lively message boards for anti-austerity. For them, the TV programmes “were the “parties” through which we would wage our political struggle on the most fundamental terrain of ideological production: television”. 20One terrain leads to another. To free workers, at all levels, from the culture industry’s grip on what Reich called their “psychical structures”, the left should broaden its communications strategies, funding and promoting a massive increase in open-source software, peer-to-peer production, multi-platform media co-operatives and the liberatory use of technology–not as one policy, but as the conduit for all its policies. Similarly, the ultimate goal of Proletkult–the creation of a new collective culture outside and beyond what had existed before–may have been crudely expressed and unaware of how much had been achieved by the culture it wished to replace, but it’s impulse was sound. It defied the elitist intellectuals of academy and Vanguard Party and sought to give voice to the voiceless.

In 1920, as the Civil War drew to a close, Lenin turned his attention to Proletkult and did not like what he saw. At a time of mass working-class discontent with the regime, he was concerned that a significant part of the new state had a semi-autonomous status and claimed to speak for the proletariat. The political climate of the time, in which Left Communists and the Workers’ Opposition were making criticisms of the state bureaucracy and the degeneration of the revolution, was not conducive to experiments in proletarian authenticity. In December 1920 Pravda published a letter, “On the Proletkults”, ostensibly from the RCP Central Committee but written by Lenin. The letter condemned Proletkult as dominated by petty-bourgeois intellectuals who were foisting decadent and reactionary artistic schemes on the working class. It announced that Proletkult as an independent body was hereby abolished and its functions placed under Nakompros.

Most of Proletkult’s experiments in painting, sculpture, theatre, verse and song had never impressed the actual proletariat. The great exception was the vast array of posters and slogans that emerged from the AgitProp department. These had real impact, perhaps because they utilised the tradition of Russian Orthodox religious art with which workers and peasants were familiar. AgitProp created what Victoria E. Bonnell called “a set of standardised images” based on clearly identifiable heroes (workers and peasants) and villains (speculators, aristocrats, etc.) laid out in simplistic tableau or sequential panels. These were held together by “an iconography with its own distinctive lexicon and syntax”. 21The use of traditional mythology to express revolutionary sentiments was best caught in Boris Zvorykin’s The Struggle of the Red Knight with the Dark Force (1919), in which the “Red Knight”, though astride a horse, fought with a hammer rather than a sword.

Given the high rate of illiteracy or semi-literacy and the lack of paper to print newspapers and books, the most effective way to communicate political messages was the propaganda poster. The power and range of Bolshevik posters was exemplified in the work of Alexander Apsit. His coloured lithograph Year of the Proletarian Dictatorship October 1917-October 1918 captured the fusion of religious and socialist imagery characteristic of the early Bolshevik poster. The central image was framed by stern, noble workers standing either side of a large window. This opened on to a procession of people carrying red flags across a green field to a large factory feeding plumes of smoke into a sunny sky. Strewn at the workers’ feet were emblems of imperial glory.

Apsit eschewed the more politicised AgitProp of the 1920s for simple historical and allegorical statements, an approach that eventually fell out of favour with Proletkult . His large, detailed lithograph The Popular Movement in the Time of Troubles (1918) vividly recreated an episode from a popular peasant rebellion of the 17th century and was highly influential in the Soviet school of historical-revolutionary art. His civil war propaganda posters Day of the Wounded Red Army Man (1919) and To Horse, Proletarian! (1920) illustrate how he used symbolism and allegory to stir emotions and drive home a political message. Although other, more ideological Proletkult poster artists such as Dmitri Moor regarded Apsit’s work as “a conglomerate of cinema poster pseudo-dramatics, vulgar symbolism and the external elements of old-fashioned romanticism”, they missed the point that this was precisely what made them so popular. Stephen White’s outstanding study of the golden age of the Bolshevik poster considered Apsit’s work “among the more notable achievements of poster art of any period”. 22

Apsit’s work set the template for the worker-hero-blacksmith of numerous other Soviet posters (about 4,000, reproduced in their millions), usually dressed in a leather apron and wielding a hammer. This imagery carried through to the flags and banners used in mass processions and festivals, particularly those that marked the anniversary of October or other public holidays. After 1920, when artists such as Moor and Deny began to eclipse Apsit, the approach to Soviet posters would focus more on clear political messages tailored to specific crisis points and military campaigns, such as Moor’s Be the Guard and the iconic Have You Volunteered? , the Soviet state’s equivalent of Lord Kitchener and “Your Country Needs YOU”.